Publisher's Summary

From Yannick Murphy, award-winning author of The Call, comes a fast-paced story of murder, adultery, parenthood, and romance, involving a girls' swim team, their morally flawed parents, and a killer who swims in their midst.

In a quiet New England community, members of swim team and their dedicated parents are preparing for a home meet. The most that Annie, a swim-mom of two girls, has to worry about is whether or not she fed her daughters enough carbs the night before; why her husband, Thomas, hasn't kissed her in ages; and why she can't get over the loss of her brother who shot himself a few years ago.

But Annie's world is about to change. From the bleachers, looking down at the swimmers, a dark haired man watches a girl. No one notices him. Annie is busy getting to know Paul, who flirts with Annie despite the fact that he's married to her friend Chris, and despite Annie's greying hair and crow's feet. Chris is busy trying to discover whether or not Paul is really having an affair, and the swimmers are trying to shave milliseconds off their race times by squeezing themselves into skin-tight bathing suits and visualizing themselves winning their races.

When a girl on the team is murdered at a nearby highway rest stop - the same rest stop where Paul made a gruesome discovery years ago - the parents suddenly find themselves adrift. Paul turns to Annie for comfort. Annie finds herself falling in love. Chris becomes obsessed with unmasking the killer.

With a serial killer now too close for comfort, Annie and her fellow swim-parents must make choices about where their loyalties lie. As a series of startling events unfold, Annie discovers what it means to follow your intuition, even if love, as well as lives, could be lost.

Performance

Story

This is...a Rather Good Book

This is Yannick Murphy, sitting at her computer, typing out her novel with an unusual storytelling approach. This is Karen White, sitting in front of a microphone, excellently reciting the books to future listeners...And so goes this book.

"This is" (Murphy's literary technique for bringing the reader into the story as though examining series of individual photographs) will be ringing in your ears by the time you finish listening to this book. It's a rather different way to depict each character's moments as she moves the reader/listener through a story about a small community, more specifically the parents and teens who comprise a local swim team, who have been terrified by a murder that has occurred in their midst.

Most of the time, the use of "this is..." was quite effective, and seemed much like looking at a series of pictures (in fact one character is a photographer). But sometimes the old nursery rhyme, "This is the house that Jack built" kept echoing through my mind in the background in some eerie fashion (perhaps that is the point of all this--that we understand stories through our own memories of momentary observations).

The book was at times very interesting and engaging--characters are vividly depicted through the most mundane observations about them. The story itself is a complex weaving of thoughts, feelings, reactions from--at first--the parents and kids on a swim team, but eventually, even the killer. It felt as though one was inside many of them, understanding the situation from each of their perspectives. Chris, who worries that her husband is having an affair. Annie, absorbed with her brother's suicide, the killer who is obsessed with his next murder, and so on. These mothers are sitting on the sidelines, watching their daughters swim. But someone else is also watching the daughters swim, and soon the plot (and the things that absorb the community) will change dramatically.

In the end, I find it impossible to use words like "I liked" or "didn't like" this book. It is more to the point to say that I found myself very drawn into it, realizing how much we define ourselves by each moment's focus in our lives. This book is actually well worth the read, and I do not think I have done it justice in this brief description of it.